Learning, Teaching, Technology and Summer

www.fotosearch.com.

During the school year many teachers feel frustrated hearing about new technologies. In most cases, the reason is lack of time.

What can be better than summer break as time to learn about new tools, open accounts or require the site to send you a forgotten username and password to access gadgets you've started some (or long) time ago, browse the Internet to get ideas on how this tool can be used in class and practice, plan, and add it to curriculum.

Check out these resources: they may help you give way to new teaching techniques in this school year :

Amazing tutorial by Intel for Project-Based Learning is excellent for anyone for a professional development opportunity for technology and differentiation (regards to Daine Vahab).

Ten Techniques to Use in a Laptop-based Classroom this article by Laura Turner covers the how-tos of blogs, wikis, digital ink, tablet PCs, online learning, and much more. Many helpful links included.

Wiki: Create Accounts For Your Students
If using a wiki is one of the tools in your class next year, to know how to create accounts in bulk is a must. Read the instructions in the Wikispaces blog.

Find safe videos for the classroom - NCTE suggests links to streaming videos that could be used for education. Tip: streaming takes a lot of bandwidth and slows down the Internet. Download videos to desktop and show them directly from your laptop.

Scholastic provides teachers with features and lesson plans for building a classroom community during the first days of school.

Claimation - creation of mini-movies: Consider incorporating claymation into lesson plans for any subject with this how-to guide. Claymation uses artist's clay, a digital camera, a computer, and video software to engage students in active learning. Students create clay figures and make them come to life by posing them in multiple frames and creating a mini-movie.

Blogs used as students' portfolios: To Shred, or Not To Shred... By Bob Sprankle
who shares his experience of using blogs for keeping his students' works instead of losing many of them at the end of the year as well as throughout the year if they are done on paper.

NCTE recommend blogging sites that are available to start a blog. They also provide some tips of how to find blogs of other teachers. Read NTCE Inbox Blog: In Search of Teacher Bloggers

Digital Photography Contest for students: Portraits of Learning, the 7th annual digital photography contest announced by Tech & Learning. Read more...